The 5 Drive

The mud swallows build their nests on the overpass, unaware of their convenient proximity to a Jack-In-The-Box, Econo Lodge, and a big, hulking, forgotten rusted thing that someone built and brought there for some reason. Maybe a long time ago, maybe last summer, or the day after Christmas, 1992.

If I could cut a window in it, I'd find out what its heart desires.

...but my thoughts have moved on to whether or not Taco Bell is worth losing step with my car's cruise control.

I decide that it totally is.

Love Poem

Love is arrogant and selfish
Boorish and unkind

it is tiresome, a word overused with little or no action behind it
it takes until you’re so empty your insides clang like an elevator shaft

Love is fat and oafish but it wants you to be stunning and fit
love wants an orgasm like that other one, time and time again, even if you want to scream with the banality of it; the obligatory nature of it

Love drools and snores and it reeks of last night’s dinner
it looks at anything with a pair of tits as if it were a thousand dollar bill

it makes you feel small enough to fit into a mailbox and it chokes on its own potential

Love is the drug that won’t even let you overdose properly, it just leaves you with the bar tab, a raging headache, and more regret to add to your collection

Love steals and leaves shitty tips, but we’ll keep chasing it with the hope that just this once it will be different for us.

Rimey

do you have the downlow on the glow and do you know does it show when I go yes or no for I have sown the seed of the weed to feed my need to be freed of the greed would be solace indeed and to shift to adrift in the rift of the lift of days in the haze where it's cold with no frost for the unbearable cost of living a life driven by strife and self-induced as it may be it still takes me you see to that place where I face now and then the feeding of the needing again and again.

being small

I climbed inside of the hill instead of climbing over it
I took root there

and now spend the minutes with my face to the sky
reveling in the simplicity of my dirt sitting room
and birdsong and breezes

I don't wait or want
the rain just comes

pulse top

one man's codependency
is another's love
and still another's sex
and it means nothing.

but it feels like morphine in skin when its pieces fit in
to the little spaces
(gaps of boredom and restraint)

what a waste
and isn't it all quite sad to give up the glow and glory for a few earthly tokens when heaven is what's meant where I was sent when your sweat dropped to my brow.

Now. What.

(artwork by Maria Tomasula)

blink

go inside
and then ask why

but leave it open
for the cloudburst and me
so that we may drink

and sleep

and believe

and learn

germinate the liturgy

stockpile the scenery

shine within the drudgery

12

My heart
the color of November
hollow shells
brittle as stars

I've left the warm cradle of a bottle-green sea
and am fostered by silence

I recall your voice
closely breathing softly arched words
they sting like wool
shine like joy

spill

thoughts fall from sunlit corners
and I can’t find the words to put down
to solidify

wrapped in birthday colors that speak in small voices
I am often comforted by the familiar touch of shadows
while the past, like rain, throws itself at me

I am weary from the weight of it

if I could throw a switch, or pull a string
if I could kiss the hull of the boat as I slip down

I would

I would scratch the emptiness that floats like fingers
between each heart beat
I would run like water
and wear you like a crown

splinter

Take all that you give
and leave it by the screen door
hinges rusted in the salted breeze back porch

Breathe in angel's skin and bird's bones
exalted in summer sun
and eyes blue eyes
all cream and sugar lips luxurious

Thank goodness for you
for the goodness in you
for all of you that's been left in me.

heaven (gabriel's gone)

Heaven was twice in my lover’s eyes
100 times in his touch

On the soft belly
and curved hips


And in the tones of the bow over the deepest string
In the indigo of winter

In a vine, and a stone,
Ocean salt on amber skin

Together
In the perfume of autumn
No ache in the small space between us

(artwork by Maria Tomasula)

40 mg Morning

Morning.

Pills in white bottles with complicated caps await me in the cupboard with the door that sticks

Pastel colored like Easter candy, they hold the promise of staying alive for another bundle of dirty-laundry gray hours in the dishwater day of an overcooked life.

Happiness is easily accessible
and cheap if you buy generic.

ron

redgirl--pencil

m

Tim Lowly

eye

pencil again

I did this while sitting on a hill in Malibu

click on this one to see the detail. This is freehand stiple from a photo that I took in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

David and Twiggy

maria tomasula...I am humbled

tim lowly is awesome

Ice Floe

the hum of moonlight

ice-cream colored

into the hush hush hush

rememberance of blue emerging quiet green

Ambergris

(artwork by Tim Lowly)

Into the grinning day burned and bent white bright alight unraveling in dust to rust


In mid-March to early September all that's left to remember
the fingers that lingered
eager for the meager angle to tangle

running

fast

like a dog in the morning

adjoining our joints at points

lost therein

unaware

the pair

crackle

My bruised muse, abused, back when I would write with the bright light and now spit only spite Venomous indeed you are and the sign was there in your eyes lies I realize I’d idealized and left bereft unleashed the filth unsettled the sediment no sentiments were meant how could I have gone there but there I went so spent I spend the minutes with no end I tend mend defend the part that was a heart and is now a stone instead

My Downfall

I desire and aspire to everything and nothing at all.

Pray Prey

You seemed so innocent and so you became the prey for the day with tiny little wings an end to my means and the peeping Tom inside take it for a ride a slide upside down down boy the fangs are long and the scratching along your screen door mewing for scraps and laps from your bowl of milk white skin let me in because I mean what I say and what I write is mean in the tick tick ticking of the ictus in my ball point the point being the poison in my pen the rise in my thighs the scorch of eyes dotted with 400 mg of painless pills that quell the swell of the ills that spell the spills of screaming demon impulse red in my head dead spread open to your teeth and tongue run for there is no fun in living in my space that’s no place for the prayers of my prey to be taste the thunder clap the fingers unwrap to set you free to your holiday home and twinkling lights of good nights goodnight I’ll be there pawing at the door in the scheme of your dream in the seam of the seem in the scene that’s the hole in the screen where I slipped in lean unseen now you lay you down to sleep the prey that day in the shallows of deep if you should cry when you awake my pet you’ve put your soul at stake

Amen.

spangle

Searching,
we find it there
On dusty white window sills in repose
waiting for moonlight to arrive and paint them
ocean colors

we find it in the fingertips of light that stroke us awake after the solitude of sleep

44

The boredom.

Septic.

It cakes its greasy stove-top stains all over my flighty writey poet self
My bones hurt until I cry and cry like dry mouths waiting for milk
Dread follows me around like a sticky child, pulling at my clothes, and pleading, "when? when?" If not now, when?

I have bled it, fucked it, and cursed it all, scraped up the scraps, and saved them for later.
any residue of joy jack knifes at the sight of yellowed wallpaper faces

I will not
I will not

I will not become you

snip-snip

Super-slinky catty grin
You shot out my tires
and left me without so much as a jack or triple A

I was trying to slide down so you could get a better view
I could’ve licked it up from the next room, it was that good
all wrapped up tight in horse leather
big balls-out rumble under a hotrod hood

I can hang with so-called artists
blow off sideways glances from horny men who do nothing for me
I stretch my legs all palomino-like across your picket fence
and quote beat poets while I talk dirty at the pure of heart

Tell me that you love me.
Buy me useless things.

and don't I know you?
Sure I do.
You did Faith in the back of a cab
Left Hope to clean it up
and Charity is still waiting for your call

Oyster

There is a silence in you
I could linger there forever

Once
we took ourselves outside to breathe
and I lost you somewhere in the midst of honesty spoken quietly
words misunderstood

and the scent of something burning bright
brought me to this place
astride the beauty, complexity, and softness that is you

You’re like sugar on my tongue
and the shiver of green that hunches like bliss beneath an autumn tree.

The sun only warmer.

The stillness of gray

The quiet of blue

Brindle

Golden-eyed
In sunlit shadows
Makes me drop all I've harvested
and takes the fruit from my hands
Lovely lamb.
He knows exactly what I need, how I feed
Strokes the strings, pulls the bow
Sugar-tongued

Green grass glow of winds that whip through red Spanish ships
Feline feral, the deep and narrow
Moving slowly over me
Like midnight

Licking love locked embrace beautiful face
Wooden horse of unbridled charm
New York October, red brick poet lover
Sets my heart to winter and my head to thunderstorms
The breath in my veins

I could love you in a rush of yellow
And Gaughin reds and blues
Like bees in June
Wake you in the morning to wonderment
The golden grasp, the salted rasp, with which I lick the wounds
Summit. Plummet.

Idealized.
Realized.

Morning Mourning

Of all of them, you were the darkest.

You didn’t wash your sheets after the last one, and so I fucked you on the shed skin of her, and slept a restless sleep in her lost hair.

While padding softly and tentatively around one another on the bare souls of our feet, we avoid each other’s eyes around corners; taking our turns at the sink, washing the other’s stains from our skin.

The floor is cold and I try to subject the room to memory; filing mental snapshots. I know I will never be there again. There’s a book with a green cover leaning against the wall; have you read it yet?

Sugar and coffee are waiting for me downstairs, and I walk as lightly as possible, trying to cover my regret with something bright, like sunshine yellow from a paint tube.

I’m dragging my ache behind me like a musty mink coat.

All that’s left in me pulls toward you, but I know that there is no Savior for me. No salvation for the woman who possesses only loose change in an old designer bag, and cheap, knock-off shoes.

I stand in your kitchen and picture myself wiping the counters with a clean blue sponge, but only for a moment, because that woman there does not have make-up straying down her face, and last night’s clothes clinging to her like dead leaves.

The phone rings. There's a voice, as clear as air… “I’m in New York now. I love you…”

New rain drops from magnolia leaves onto my hands as I walk across your driveway;
you call to me urgently so that you can put your tongue in my mouth.

I will return to an empty apartment, and spend my morning waiting for a call that won’t come; plan my feigned disinterest if it does.


I can still smell you.

White Noise

one day
which is much like the next
endless in its tenacity
and the heart
keeps
pushing my blood
whether I want it to
or not
and my apathy is the most constant
part
of me.